Marginalia

Fragments, aphorisms, and verse—2017–2026

On Narrative

Just as we remain stuck in this reality by only seeing shadow—story—fiction, narrative may also liberate with power.

South Orange County, 2017

Spirit is empowered by story. Look at how these movements and religions springboard from story. How ideas spring from a narrative.

2017

Memories are bottom up, so you can't compose them until narrative.

San Diego, 2020

i want everything unfortunately
so i can't relax i have to have a great story

San Juan Capistrano, 2018

The story of my life is not how I succumb to pressure.

2018

Verse

oh God I need a good story
and i don't know what's real and what's fake
I want a body that knows exactly who he is
moving and singing from his heart to his ears

but i can't stop or start or gate on lies

San Diego, 2019

manifest
the narrative concedes

if i love you i am god

“i wanna love you god”
“now i love you. really”
never far from the truth
never with it

no knows

San Diego, 2018

I want accountability
I want someone who knows me
And I want to be someone who is worth knowing

Maui, 2018

Life's been a soundcheck so far.

2018

On Design

A well-designed tool disappears into use, amplifying human capability without demanding attention.

Separate what changes from what must be stable.

Immature design is too controlling—and it compromises the parts that really do have to be controlled.

On a frisbee robot, age 15

Compressing complexity into reliable systems.


On Intelligence

Agent harnesses should be thin interfaces to scalable computation, not the place you stash the intelligence.

If model capability doubles next year, does your system get dramatically simpler without major refactors? That's the test.

The future belongs to those who can run along the edge of LLM psychosis without losing control.

If everyone can build everything, the bottleneck shifts entirely to taste and distribution.

The market for feeling productive is orders of magnitude larger than the market for being productive.

Do not labor to compete with the machine, own the machine.


The Middle

Simulation compresses whatever it can reach. Human effort migrates to whatever it can't. This is how it has always worked. It will be more true after AGI than before. That is more phases of more games compressed into recitation, more human work pushed to the edges where the position is still live.

But we have made a category error. We have confused simulating an endgame with arriving at one. These are not the same thing. The ability to model the terminal state of AI does not mean the terminal state of AI is close. The ability to simulate the outcome of a war does not mean the war is over.

We have become so fluent in endgame reasoning that we have mistaken fluency for proximity—and proximity to the end is the only thing that makes work feel urgent anymore, so we keep manufacturing it.

God did not build a world that was immediately primed for judgment. It has been two thousand years. It will very likely be many more.

Simulation has not exhausted the middle. It has exhausted our patience for it. The middle is still where the complications live, where the position is ambiguous and the thing no one modeled happens and you have to play the board as it is.